American Nukes

About Atomic Annie

t’s a parade in Washington, DC, and there are marching bands and dignitaries, the dignitaries with identifying placards hung on the sides of their black cars, and there are marching bands and pretty girls and floats for each state, the float for New York itself featuring a Statue of liberty at the front pf the platform and a Niagara Falls at the rear. There is Eisenhower now, standing, waving his hat as was the style, and there is Nixon, smiling and smiling, and there are the soldiers stepping smartly, and a ways behind them are a pair of M41 Walker Bulldog tanks, guns elevated in celebration, and later on an elephant trumpets and kneels in front of Eisenhower at the viewing stand, much to the new president’s delight.

There is more to see on this special day and, look, there is the Redstone, painted a polished dark olive drab. The sign attached to the float says it is “The Army’s Newest Largest Supersonic Weapon,” forgetting to mention it is a nuclear missile, the first ICBM, in fact. Behind it comes the Corporal, a short-range nuclear missile, riding on its launch vehicle. Twin Nike-Ajax missiles, titled toward the sky roll down the road, red Terriers coming up behind.

The Regulus is there, too, looking like some space-age rocket plane, painted the same red as the Terriers, and the Navy seems to have had an abundance of red paint. After the miniature aircraft carrier comes a Matador, easily confused with a life-size inflatable, orange in color, rocking worrisomely on its parade-float platform. The Snark is there, too, as is the air-to-air Falcon (and still no sighting of the word “atomic” or “nuclear” on any of the floats’ signs), and don’t miss the Honest John nuclear rockets, and then, trudging along, its huge barrel lowered into its trailer making it almost unrecognizable as a cannon, lugged and pushed along by not one but two custom-made trucks, with no sign of a sign to identify it for the crowd, is an Atomic Annie, four months before the nuclear test.

In the years before the Army developed nuclear rockets and short-range missiles they wanted a nuclear cannon, something that could slow the Soviets in Europe (or the North Koreans and Chinese in Korea) during an invasion, a cannon being suitable (unlike air-dropped bomb) for all weather conditions, day or night. Thus was born the M65, a gun with a barrel opening of 280mm, 40mm larger than the previous largest cannon in the US arsenal. Initially, the Army was hoping to use the 240mm cannon with a nuclear shell but the nuclear projectile could not be made that small, so a new gun was developed.

It was an expensive gun, horribly expensive, with each of the twenty units built costing about $800,000 in 1953 dollars. And its shells were far more expensive. The eighty 280mm projectiles, by one estimate, cost $10,000,000 each, over three-quarters of a billion dollars in total, almost $100 billion in today’s dollars.

Atomic Annie became atomic at 8:30 am, May 25, 1953, when Able Annie, one of two prototype 280mm guns sent to the Frenchman’s Flat area of the Nevada Proving Grounds, fired a live nuclear shell into the desert, the resulting explosion equal to that of Little Boy over Hiroshima. Able Annie became Atomic Annie and all of the other M65s gained that same moniker. The film of the nuclear shot, the cannon, and the explosion seven miles away and of the soldiers rising out of their trenches and marching toward ground zero even as the mushroom cloud grows in size, is one of the iconic visions of the Cold War.

But Atomic Annie was destined to be primarily a showhorse rather than an effective weapon. Its mobility, a key advantage to any artillery unit, was greatly limited by its enormous mass, relegating it to a maximum of forty miles per hour and even that only on improved roads and reinforced bridges, and its top-heavy nature making transport even in the best conditions a peril for its crew. As a nuclear artillery it was as effective as a much larger number of conventional artillery guns but that also meant that knocking out a single nuclear cannon was a significant achievement for any enemy, who would know this and make every effort to locate the Atomic Annie. What most limited the M65’s tactical usefulness, however, was simply its slow development, where Honest John artillery rockets and short-range Corporal missiles served the Army’s purposes more effectively, entering service at about the same time as Atomic Annie.

Back at Fort Sill, ahead of the tenth-anniversary celebration of the M65, someone noticed that the serial number of their original Atomic Annie wasn’t right. Their Atomic Annie wasn’t Annie but was instead Sad Sack, the companion to Annie at the nuclear test site, the unused backup gun. A search, compounded by secrecy, eventually located the real Annie in Germany and it was brought back. On the way the gun rolled over, its ninety-four tons crushing its transporter vehicles and killing two people. Atomic Annie lay in a ditch for days.

Gallery

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

Videos

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